Friday, 29 February 2008

What to make of the British prince who joined the fight in Afghanistan, until reporters blew his cover? Good for him, slaughtering jihadists is job number one for the civilized world, and screw the squealers. The prince’s necessary return home now won’t much diminish the war effort, but denying any man the opportunity to serve his nation, for a mere scoop, is a despicable thing. It must be the work of especially small and pathetic men.

So many words have already been spoken about the new Hillary! ad that I’m surprised nobody has pointed out an obvious, and potentially comical, flaw. The premise of the spot is that Americans—even adorable tots!—sleeping peacefully in their beds at three a.m. are better off if Hillary! is in the White House to answer the phone should crisis befall America.

The spot ends with Hillary! answering the phone:

Uh, why is she completely dressed at three a.m. waiting for an unforeseen emergency? [Maybe she was waiting up for Bill to come home!—ed.]

Threatening to renege on a permanent treaty — as Clinton and Obama are doing through their identical vows to "opt out" of the deal — signals loudly that America’s word is no longer its bond. A permanent pact with the U.S., it turns out, isn’t so permanent.

Toss in a surrender in Iraq and we’ll have a world where neither American carrots nor American sticks are taken seriously. Laughably, these candidates would then want to rely on diplomacy, the offering of carrots and threatening of sticks, as the basis of American power.

Everyone knows the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. How many remember that, in addition, the First Amendment protects a fifth freedom -- to lobby?

Of course it doesn’t use the word lobby. It calls it the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists are people hired to do that for you, so that you can actually stay home with the kids and remain gainfully employed rather than spend your life in the corridors of Washington.

To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you’d think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.

Lobbying is constitutionally protected, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it all. Let’s agree to frown upon bad lobbying, such as getting a tax break for a particular industry. Let’s agree to welcome good lobbying -- the actual redress of a legitimate grievance -- such as protecting your home from being turned to dust to make way for some urban development project.

There is a defense of even bad lobbying. It goes like this: You wouldn’t need to be seeking advantage if the federal government had not appropriated for itself in the 20th century all kinds of powers, regulations, intrusions and manipulations (often through the tax code) that had never been presumed in the 19th century and certainly were never imagined by the Founders. What appears to be rent-seeking is thus redress of a larger grievance -- insufferable government meddling in what had traditionally been considered an area of free enterprise.

The irony is that the real abuse of redress rights is when they become coupled with assemblies that are anything but peaceful. Rioters are getting better treatment these days than lobbyists.

Twofer blasts America once more, this time concentrating on corporations:

As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. "The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids," she says.

"Barack and I were in that position," she continues. "The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids." A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. "We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do," she tells the women. "Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond." Faced with that reality, she adds, "many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management."

What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.

Like a John Kerry speech, this borders on the cornucopian. A few points:

Nobody put a gun to her head and forced her to go to Princeton and Harvard, schools she has admitted her grades did not qualify her to attend.

Where, if not from corporate America, does Twofer think the salaries of teachers, social workers and nurses ultimately come from? She’s too fine a person to make money, but not above shoveling it at poor people. Oh, does anybody else smell a massive government program to rectify the difference in pay between teachers and corporate lawyers?

Like Hillary!, Twofer experienced a massive jump in pay when hubby took office. These coincidences are just amazing.

Does anybody think Obambi’s books would have been best-sellers if he were still in the Illinois state senate?

Thursday, 28 February 2008

The New York Times is in its periodic tizzy about the number of people incarcerated in the United States. I’d think they’d be thankful it doesn’t include more of the Times’s reporters who’ve exposed our intelligence programs.

George Will reminds us that hating the New York Times requires not an ounce of love for John McCain:

McCain should thank the Times also because its semi-steamy story distracted attention from an unsavory story about McCain’s dexterity in gaming the system for taxpayer financing of campaigns. Last summer, when his mismanagement of his campaign left it destitute, he applied for public funding, which entails spending limits. He seemed to promise to use tax dollars as partial collateral for a bank loan.

There are two ways for a candidate to get on Ohio’s primary ballot -- comply with complex, expensive rules for gathering signatures or simply be certified to receive taxpayer funding. McCain’s major Republican rivals did the former. He did the latter.

Democrats, whose attachment to campaign reforms is as episodic as McCain’s, argue that having made such uses of promised matching funds, McCain is committed to taking them and abiding by spending limits -- which would virtually silence his campaign until the September convention. This would be condign punishment for his argument that restricting spending does not restrict speech. But Bradley Smith offers him some support.

Smith, behaving honorably toward someone who does not reciprocate civilities, today says McCain has an arguable case that, not having cashed any public checks, he should be released from his commitment and the spending ceiling.

Which reminds me, after the Times’s smear, we heard much about how conservatives moved toward McCain, but nothing about how McCain moved away from the Times and toward conservatives. Why couldn’t McCain muster a true repudiation of a rag that has now attacked not only national security, but his precious honor?

As is his wont, Howie Carr was brutally candid in his Sunday take on the trumped-up McCain scandal:

Vicki Iseman looks like a younger version of Cindy McCain.

That’s the bottom line of this whole John McCain non-scandal.

Forget the facts, or lack thereof. They can never admit it, but this is what The New York Times is hanging its hat on: John McCain’s first wife was a blonde, his second wife is a blonde, and Vicki Iseman is a blonde.

Case closed. John McCain must be guilty, that horny old goat.

The reality is that guys, like racehorses, generally run true to form. When they ditch one woman, they usually hook up with one that matches up pretty well with the earlier model, only younger. Key word: younger.

Any port in a storm, obviously, and everyone knows the dames all look better at closing time. But over the long haul, most guys have a preference.

John Wayne had a thing for Latinas. John Kerry likes ’em very old and very, very rich. And John McCain, like so many gentlemen, prefers blondes.

They say women reporters used to dress in red to attract Ronald Reagan’s eye at press conferences. But that’s a simple matter of optics, not preferences. Henneberg is clearly McCain’s sort of gal, however professionally she behaves. Indeed, she looks more "like a younger version of Cindy McCain" than Vicki Iseman did.

Which makes you wonder, is the Fox News assignment editor trying to get an edge by putting Henneberg with McCain? And wonder as well, will the McCain staff overcompensate in denying her one, in a quest for an absolute purity on a sensitive subject?

For the record, Ms. Henneberg is welcome to interview Libertyblog any time.